On Eurovision

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the philosophy student turned transcendental black metal frontman, justifies the existence of his band, Liturgy, as follows: since we live between two incomprehensibly immense catastrophes, the WESTERN APOCALYPSE of the 20th century (especially the two world wars) and the approaching COSMIC APOCALYPSE of ecological catastrophe, total war, etc., and since it is too late for human intervention to save us from the COSMIC APOCALYPSE, any action to avert it must, in order to succeed, tap into a source of power beyond what is humanly possible. Following Meillassoux’s argument that Hume’s question concerning the rational justification of belief in causal necessity reveals that “we could a priori … conceive a chaotic modification of natural laws” and therefore that we could posit their contingency, “adhere to the intellection of a radical Chaos which Hume has masterfully, if implicitly, reveal to us”, reject transcendent laws of all kinds, and think the “contingent, but eternally possible, effect of a Chaos unsubordinated to any law”, which is God, Hunt-Hendrix holds that, due to the univocal continuity of the ideal and the real, the birth of a God or a “redeemer-messiah” could, in principle, be brought about by human art; and he explicitly cites as inspiration the Mysterium, Alexander Scriabin’s concept of a week-long work of music and art, held in the foothills of the Himalayas, with bells hanging from the clouds in the sky, participation from the audience and from the surrounding birds and insects, etc., which would bring about the ecstatic dissolution of the universe and its transmutation into a higher plane of being. Unfortunately, the Mysterium was never completed: Scriabin died at the age of 44, of two different types of blood poisoning at the same time.

The missing piece of Hunt-Hendrix’s formulation of this messianic musical mission, although, as will be revealed later, it is debatable whether this was a miscalculation or an intentional elision, is the numerological aspect of this apocalyptic history. It is, as he says, a theoretical and an ethical choice to posit univocality, to work out a thought or a logic that encompasses the All; but one must notice, for example, the structure of the Christian God, or the minimal number of sides a two-dimensional polygon may have, or Hunt-Hendrix’s intertwined (interthrined) trike of art, music, and philosophy. The cover art of Liturgy’s latest album, The Ark Work, consists of two intertwined triangles, each missing a side—the same side, in fact; and the significance of this will soon be explained—; are we to take this as a sign that Hunt-Hendrix is aware of his omission?

Many recent mythological systems, including Hunt-Hendrix’s mythology of the Ark Work, revolve around an apocalyptic event that separated the incomprehensible traditions of the now-forgotten time that it ended from the ‘(pre)history as we know it’ that it created. Christianity contains the myth of Satan’s rebellion against God, the resulting birth of demons, and Satan’s temptation of Eve; Edenism contains the myth of the prehuman Melons engineering a humanoid biological weapon to bring about the apocalyptic destruction of the Neanderthal race, sometimes identified with Atlantis and Antarctica; the Nation of Islam contains the myth of the mad scientist Yakub, who grafted a race of devils to dominate the earth; and the recent legend of the Hyperwar revolves around the cataclysmic domination of a Eurasia-spanning civilization of telepaths by the Hwan Empire’s mass deployment of ‘nerve-stapling’, which cut prehumans off from the transcendent realm and from their innate psychic abilities. Certain similarities can be immediately noticed between all of these myths: the FIRST APOCALYPSE, the missing side of the Ark Work’s triangle(s), consisted of the deliberate injection of seemingly essential differenceinto the world, resulting in fracture, fragmentation, and f/Fall.

Some, albeit fewer, mythological systems also contain a close to the period of history as we know it, a positive apocalypse similar to that of Hunt-Hendrix and Scriabin. The most obvious example is the Christian eschaton, but more interesting in the context of Eurovision are Hegel’s Weltgeist, the singular spirit of the universe that will come to fully know itself at the end the dialectical process of history (which is composed of three repeating components), Hunt-Hendrix’s myth of the return of the creator-redeemer 01010n upon the reassembly of her shattered offspring, and perhaps the reversal of nerve-stapling and the rebirth of the Ancient Finnish Empire. To this list we may add the Marxist myth that human society had as its initial condition primitive communism, began developing inexorably through the stages of economic life once history began (which beginning is often identified with the advent of agriculture; cf. the Yazidi identification of the Forbidden Fruit with wheat), and will inevitably end with communism. In all of these mythological systems,

It would be a mistake, albeit a tempting one, to characterize this primordial, world-shattering conflict as a war between Good and Evil; it is best considered as a war between, as per Sandifer, Deceleration and Acceleration, or (in some tellings) the beginning of a war that continues to this day, with the forces of Acceleration checked at every turn but never fully defeated. Satan, of course, was the first accelerationist, being (via the Fall of Man) literally responsible for the existence of History itself, hence the Mormon characterization of the Fall as a necessary and even positive step in the eternal ascent of mankind (and in mainstream Christianity, consider that it is only because of Satan that God can be merciful and that His son can be a redeemer); Yakub responded to widespread political discontent in Mecca by weaponizing the most advanced technology available to him to create the race that went on to create modernity and the conditions of modern-day accelerationism; and the Hyperwar not only broke up the massive psychic connectivity of the prehuman world but fragmented the two world-spanning empires of the time into innumerable city-states, in accord with the secessionist agenda of many accelerationists today.

One may now ask: if, as per Hunt-Hendrix, it is a (desirable) theoretical and ethical choice to think univocally, how is it not ‘evil’ to introduce this essential difference into the world? The answer is simple, and contained in Hunt-Hendrix’s mythology itself, which (as previously mentioned) reflects the memory of the FIRST APOCALYPSE: the Wrath of God, the “shy virgin” 01010n, wanted to give someone her unbearably powerful light, so she gave birth to S/he/im, a “proto-gendered subject-object”, who couldn’t bear it and immediately shattered. 01010n retreated, but left behind a flicker of light, the Genesis Caul, born of the act, which in turn bore Kel Valhaal and Reign Array. These two entities have the task, led by the Genesis Caul, of creating prisms to reflect 01010n’s light, that someday S/he/im may be able to bear it, and that someday 01010n may return and redeem the world. Compare Nick Land’s ‘neoreactionary’ formulation of accelerationism: capitalistic, secessionistic fragmentation, the maximization of geopolitical difference, is desirable precisely because it will lead to the elimination of difference, by empowering the forces destined to give birth to a superintelligent machinic singleton, an artificial messiah whose presence retroactively redeems the world that created it. This singularitarian accelerationism frequently overlaps with transhumanism, producing a historiopolitical system supporting the intensification of human psychological, cultural, and morphological difference and the creation of a machinic God, a unitary redeemer-messiah, to end history, unite the world, and avert the COSMIC APOCALYPSE. Note that, because in Land’s formulation of accelerationism the intensification of difference will bring about its elimination, efforts to reduce difference are in this system necessarily decelerationist.

Certain aspects of the reputation of those associated with Land’s ‘neoreactionary’ formulation of accelerationism must be understood before the events of this year’s Eurovision may be rendered comprehensible, but the mythological and prehistorical background must be explained first. Consider the myth of the FIRST APOCALYPSE contained within Christianity: after Satan, the first accelerationist, led an army of (fallen) angels to secede from the Kingdom of God and injected difference into the world, he began the process of history via the Temptation of Eve. In the Garden of Eden, Adam had eternal life, as did Eve, who was fashioned from Adam’s rib; it was only after and due to the Fall that man became mortal. The Christian mythology may not seem relevant here, since it seems to posit two prehistoric apocalypses—the myth of Satan and the myth of the Flood—but these are rightly considered as two components of the same FIRST APOCALYPSE. (The third side of the triangle, which must exist for aforementioned numerological reasons, is revealed by the separation of the myth of Satan and the myth of the Fall. Thus does univocality reveal itself: as the Christian God is triune, so is the Christian FIRST APOCALYPSE.) This is for three(!) reasons: first, they are all contained in Genesis—Satan appears as the serpent in the Genesis narrative of the Fall (a uniquely Christian addition, perhaps arising out of numerological necessity)—; second, it was the evil of mankind (i.e. Satan) that motivated God to flood the Earth; and third, the Flood is contained temporally within a trend of the Genesis narrative: lifespans decrease over time. Methuselah, who lived and died before the Flood, lived for 969 years; the patriarch Abraham, however, died “a good old age, an old man, and full of years” (KJV)—and this “good old age” was only 175! This trend stretches backwards, of course, to the prelapsarian time, since Adam and Eve were immortal. The significance of this should be readily apparent, given the established significance of difference to the structure of history: a reduction in (or acceleration of) human lifespan beginning with immortality (combined with the end of the era where humans could be born from other humans’ ribs) may be reinterpreted as an increase in the importance of heterosexuality, i.e. the sexual love of essential difference. We may assume, on the grounds of their immortality, their prelapsarian method of reproduction, and the clear conceptual parallels with the recurring mythological pattern wherein history is bracketed by the beginning and end of essential difference, that Adam and Eve were gay; and that, given Satan’s association with difference and historical Christianity’s generally negative attitude toward sex, heterosexuality is of the devil; and furthermore, given the importance of difference to the many myths of the FIRST APOCALYPSE, which we may assume, following the usual methods of mythological scholarship, reflect a real event, we are led naturally and necessarily to the conclusion that the FIRST APOCALYPSE was the introduction of mortality/heterosexuality, that messianic apocalypticism of the sort that Hunt-Hendrix advocates is precisely the Gay Agenda, and that there is perhaps a vast and ancient conspiracy of incredibly gay accelerationists—perhaps including the Sacred Band of Thebes, a little-known army of homosexuals which was eventually defeated by Philip II of Macedon, father of noted decelerationist Alexander the Great. As it happens, “conspiracy of incredibly gay accelerationists” is precisely the reputation of the group most closely associated with Landian accelerationism; but one must expect that an ancient conspiracy would have more than one tentacle—which brings us to Eurovision.

Eurovision, for those who don’t know, is an annual song contest in which any European country can participate. It was created after the WESTERN APOCALYPSE to promote European unity (i.e. decelerationism), but has evolved into a significant institution within gay culture. The Eurovision stage is often used to promote political causes—for example, this year, Russia placed third with a song about a possessive lover and Ukraine won with a horror ballad about Stalin’s deportation of the Tatars from Crimea, last year Georgia entered a goth track good enough that everyone politely ignored that it was supposed to be about feminism or something (admittedly, it helped that it was sung by a model with a superhuman fashion sense), and two years ago Austria won with a bearded-lady drag act—and it is universally used to remind the world of the bizarre fact that the only two European countries that have any taste at all are Georgia and Montenegro. (Finland usedto, but now it doesn’t.) Since Eurovision is often political, we should expect to see the conflict between decelerationism and accelerationism play out within it, and indeed we do: its inclusion of Australia for two years in a row shows the decelerationist tendencies of its administration, and whichever conspiracy made so manyentrantshavethatgodawfulTumblrhaircut is, given Tumblr’s politics, surely decelerationist as well. So, to find the opposing, accelerationist conspiracy, we ought to look for the entrant with the best hair.

This exercise is vastly more interesting than it may seem. The entrant with the best (and most Hunt-Hendrix-like) hair is, objectively and indisputably, Alexander Ivanov of Belarus—who, rumor has it, wanted to perform his entry, “Help You Fly” (an accelerationist song title if ever there was one) naked and accompanied by two live wolves. (Gay furry stuff is in fact not uncommon in Eurovision: see Cyprus 2016 and Azerbaijan 2015.) Naturally, they didn’t let him—and, given the importance of aerial travel (remember the bells hanging from the clouds in the sky) and animal participation to the Mysterium of another East Slav named Alexander, the only possible conclusion is that Ivanov’s performance was to be the realization of the Mysterium, and the messianic project of the Gay Accelerationist Illuminati was almost brought to fruition, but was thwarted in the eleventh hour by the vast decelerationist conspiracy.